“Hello, little one,” the man says as Nassun stares. “That’s quite the trick.”
Jija tries to move, shifting his leg along the harpoon shaft, and it is awful. There is the abortive sound of bone grating on metal, and he groan-coughs out an agonized cry, grabbing spasmodically for Nassun. Nassun catches his shoulder, but he’s heavy, and she’s tired, and she realizes in sudden horror that she lacks the strength to fight the man with the glassknife if that should be necessary. Jija’s shoulder shakes beneath her hand, and she’s shaking nearly as hard. Maybe this is why no one uses the stuff underneath the heat? Now she and her father will pay the price for her folly.
But the black-haired man hunkers down, moving with remarkably slow grace for someone who showed such swift brutality only moments before. “Don’t be afraid,” he says. He blinks then, something flickering and uncertain in his gaze. “Do I know you?”
Nassun has never before seen this giant with the icewhite eyes and the world’s longest knife. The knife is still in his hand, though now it dangles at his side, dripping. She shakes her head, a little too hard and fast.
The man blinks, the uncertainty clears, and the smile returns. “The beasts are dead. I came to help you, didn’t I?” Something is off about the question. He asks it as if he seeks confirmation: didn’t I? It’s too sincere, too heartfelt somehow. Then he says, “I won’t let anyone hurt you.”
Perhaps it is only coincidence that his gaze slides over to her father’s face after he says this. But. Something in Nassun unclenches, just a little.
Then Jija tries to move again and makes another pained sound, and the man’s gaze sharpens. “How unpleasant. Let me help you—” He sets down the knife and reaches for Jija.
“Stay the rust back—” Jija blurts, trying to move back and jerking all over with the pain of this. He’s panting, too, and sweating. “Who are you? Are you?” His eyes roll toward the flowing ridge of hex-stone. “From?”
The man, who has drawn back at Jija’s reaction, follows his gaze. “Oh. Yes. The comm’s sentries saw you coming along the road. Then we saw the bandits moving in, so I came to help. We’ve had trouble with that lot before. It was a convenient opportunity to eliminate the threat.” His white gaze shifts back to Nassun, flicking at the sheared-off harpoon along the way. He has never stopped smiling. “But you should not have had trouble with them.”
He knows what Nassun is. She cringes against her father, though she knows he is no shelter. It’s habit.
Her father tenses, his breath quickening to a rasp. “Are… are you…” He swallows. “We’re looking for the Moon.”
The man’s smile widens. His accent is something Equatorial; Equatorials always have such strong white teeth. “Ah, yes,” he says. “You’ve found it.”
Her father slumps in relief, to the degree that his leg allows. “Oh… oh. Evil Earth, at last.”
Nassun can’t take it anymore. “What is the Moon?”
“Found Moon.” The man inclines his head. “That is the name of our community. A very special place, for very special people.” Then he sheaths the knife and extends one hand, palm up, offering. “My name is Schaffa.”
The hand is held out only to Nassun, and Nassun doesn’t know why. Maybe because he knows what she is? Maybe only because her hand isn’t covered with blood, as both of Jija’s are. She swallows and takes the hand, which immediately and firmly closes around hers. She manages, “I’m Nassun. That’s my father.” She lifts her chin. “Nassun Resistant Tirimo.”
Nassun knows that her mother was trained by the Fulcrum, which means that Mama’s use name was never “Resistant.” And Nassun is only ten years old now, too young for Tirimo to recognize with a comm name even if she still lived there. Yet the man inclines his head gravely, as if it is not a lie. “Come, then,” he says. “Let’s see if between the two of us, we can’t get your father free.”
He rises, pulling her up with him, and she turns toward Jija, thinking that with Schaffa here they can maybe just lift Jija off the shaft and that if they do it fast enough maybe it won’t hurt him too much. But before she can open her mouth to say this, Schaffa presses two fingers to the back of her neck. She flinches and rounds on him, instantly defensive, and he raises both hands, wagging the fingers to show that he’s still unarmed. She can feel a bit of damp on her neck, probably a smear of blood.
“Duty first,” he says.
“What?”
He nods toward her father. “I can lift him, while you shift the leg.”
Nassun blinks again, confused. The man moves over to Jija, and she is distracted from wondering about that strange touch by her father’s cries of pain as they work him free.
Much later, though, she will remember an instant after that touch, when the tips of the man’s fingers glimmered like the cut ends of the harpoon. A gossamer-thin thread of light-under-the-heat had seemed to flicker from her to him. She will remember, too, that for a moment that thread of light illuminated others: a whole tracework of jagged lines spreading all over him like the spiderwebbing that follows a sharp impact in brittle glass. The impact site, the center of the spiderweb, was somewhere near the back of his head. Nassun will remember thinking in that instant: He’s not alone in there.
In the moment it is no matter. Their journey has ended. Nassun is, apparently, home.
The Guardians do not speak of Warrant, where they are made. No one knows its location. When asked, they only smile.
8
you’ve been warned
YOU’RE IN LINE TO PICK up your household’s share for the week when you hear the first whisper. It’s not directed at you, and it’s not meant to be overheard, but you hear it anyway because the speaker is agitated and forgets to be quiet. “Too Earthfired many of ’em,” an older man is saying to a younger man, when you pull yourself out of your own thoughts enough to process the words. “Ykka’s all right, earned her place, didn’t she? Gotta be a few good ones. But the rest? We only need one—”
The man is shushed by his companion at once. You fix your gaze on a distant group of people trying to haul some baskets of mineral ore across the cavern by use of a guided ropeslide, so that when the younger man looks around he won’t see you looking at them. But you remember.
It’s been a week since the incident with the boilbugs and it feels like a month. This isn’t just losing track of days and nights. Some of the strange elasticity of time comes from your having lost Nassun, and with her the urgency of purpose. Without that purpose you feel sort of attenuated and loose, as aimless as compass needles must have been during the Wandering Season. You’ve decided to try settling in, recentering your awareness, exploring your new boundaries, but that isn’t helping much. Castrima’s geode defies your sense of size as well as time. It feels cluttered when you stand near one of the geode’s walls, where the view of the opposite wall is occluded by dozens of jagged, crisscrossing quartz shafts. It feels empty when you pass entire crystals’ worth of unoccupied apartments, and realize the place was built to hold many more people than it currently does. The trading post on the surface was smaller than Tirimo—yet you’re beginning to realize that Ykka’s efforts at recruitment for Castrima have been exceptionally successful. At least half of the people you meet in the comm are new, same as you. (No wonder she wanted some new people on her improvised advising council; newness is a group trait here.) You meet a nervous metallorist and three knappers who are nothing like Jija, a biomest who works with Lerna two days a week, and a woman who once made a living selling artful leather crafts as gifts, who now spends her days tanning skins that the Hunters bring in.